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Tag: tutorial

She’d been salivating over it for months (years, maybe?) and finally, it was here. No more odd-sized bars cut from shoe box molds. No more fighting with freezer paper or struggling to precisely line makeshift molds. She dove into the newly delivered box and unwrapped a brand-new silicone lined mold. Admiring its fine, shiny, perfectly square edges, panic set in…

If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, you’re not alone. Figuring out how much soap will fit in a mold, like Marie Gale might say, is not complicated, but it is very detailed.

Now, you can easily use an online calculator (here, here, here) to size your soap recipe to your mold, but just in case you desperately need to make soap when the power’s out, here’s an explanation behind the math.

In order to figure out how much soap will fit your mold, you first need to figure out the volume of your new mold. Assuming your beautiful, shiny new mold is a rectangle (or a square, which is technically also a rectangle), this is easy. Measure the inside length, width, and height of your mold in inches. Below, we’ve made up some numbers so that you can follow the calculations.

Step 1: measure inside dimensions of mold >>

Inner length of mold, in inches: 10 in

Inner width of mold, in inches: 3.625 in

Inner height of mold, in inches: 2.25 in

Multiply those numbers. This gives you the volume in cubic inches.

Step 2: Calculate volume >> Length x width x height = 81.56 in3

Unfortunately, I don’t know many soapmakers working in cubic inches, so let’s convert cubic inches to ounces. One cubic inch equals 0.554113 ounces, so we can multiply the volume by 0.554 to convert from inches to ounces.

Step 3: Convert volume to ounces >> 81.56 in3x 0.554 = 45.2 oz

You’re almost there. You have volume in the correct units, however, you need to convert from volume to weight (ounces are tricky that way). We know that one volumetric ounce of oil does not weigh one ounce. For many vegetable oils, one ounce of oil at room temperature will only weigh 0.9 ounces. (This is referred to as specific gravity and yes, this number is a gross generalization.)

Step 4: Convert volume to weight > 45.2 oz x 0.9 = 40 oz

Congratulations, you’ve estimated the total soap volume that will fit into your mold. (Insert a happy soaper dance here, along with a fist pump of soapmaking victory, if you like.)

If you are making a cold or hot process soap and want to estimate just how much oil to use, Member David Fisher has an easy to follow guide.